Rewriting History
Much has been said and written this past week - to mark the 10th anniversary of the beginning of war in Iraq - but I enjoyed the following piece by David Aaronovitch in The Times.
To my mind he's spot on about the many Westminster politicians who have now re-written history - and carefully positioned themselves as if they were opponents of the decision to invade Iraq.
The only politician whom I remember acting with any principle on the subject was Labour's Robin Cook who - while recognising it was a finely balanced decision - nonetheless resigned his position as Labour's Foreign Secretary.
Not a 'cheep' was heard out of all the other senior Labour figures including the party's present leader - Ed Miliband - who either voted to support the decision in the House of Commons or who were conveniently out of the country at the time.
The decision to intervene in another country's internal affairs is always very difficult - and has met with mixed success over the years.
Armed intervention in the former Yugoslavia stopped mass murder and ethnic cleansing on an industrial scale - and is now widely regarded as the right thing to have done at the time.
Rwanda was a different matter altogether and the failure of the UN and western countries to act - meant that hundreds of thousands of Africans lost their lives in the tribal violence that erupted in that country.
Using force of arms to eject Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their Taleban protectors out of Afghanistan was a military success - but the country's medieval culture is extremely resistant to change and the Hamid Karzai government seems hopelessly corrupt.
So Afghanistan must be regarded as a failure - in a wider sense.
In Iraq the jury is still out - the country is broadly divided into spheres of influence which favour the Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and the Iraqi Kurds - but Sunni element is still doing its best to ferment civil war.
Next door in Syria - with not an American or westerner in sight - over 70,000 people have lost their lives in the past 18 months - as a result of another murderous civil war between Shia and Sunni Muslims.
As in Libya in 2012 - there are many people urging the UN western powers to intervene in Syria - and that argument is again finely balanced - as the French are finding out in Mali.
Now we know why it was right to invade Iraq
By David Aaronovitch
Ten years after the war began, the country is more secure and democratic. The alternative was Syria on steroids
Public life these days proceeds by anniversaries, mythologies and statistics. So Tuesday is the tenth anniversary of the parliamentary debate that permitted Britain’s participation in the invasion of Iraq. Two weeks ago we had the anniversary (for some far more personally significant) of the Great Iraq Demonstration. On March 20 it will be ten years since the invasion began. And I’ll also include, for reasons that will become apparent, March 16, the 25th anniversary of the gassing of the Kurdish/Iraqi town of Halabja.
The public mythologies — the constantly repeated “facts” that are almost certainly wrong or just not facts — include the routine doubling of the numbers on the demo to two million, the assertion that “a million” Iraqis have died violently since the invasion, the repetition of the claim that Tony Blair lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the tacking of the word “illegal” on to the invasion although there has been no such finding by any relevant court.
Such mythologies were scarcely needed to assist an argument against the invasion. Someone like me, who reached the conclusion in the winter of 2002-03 that Saddam Hussein had to be removed by force and argued it in print and in public, has a lot to answer for. By the most trustworthy estimates, 180,000 Iraqis have died, along with more than 4,000 Americans and 179 British military personnel. The financial cost has been staggering, running into trillions of dollars.
Although the power of the US was amply demonstrated by the defeat of Saddam, its reputation was horribly damaged by the occupation. The administration of Iraq was characterised by incompetence and infighting in the Bush Government. The human and public relations catastrophe of Abu Ghraib created the most potent symbols that any anti-American could wish for. And then there were the seemingly casual military brutalities such as the 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad.
There have also been more intangible costs of invasion. I doubt now whether it made much difference to what has happened in Afghanistan, but it has certainly made the West timid and anxious whenever confronted with even the most limited intervention. Iraq, I think, exhausted us.
I continually meet people who have never heard the argument in favour of removing Saddam. Labour supporters of the invasion have all disappeared — the old have had enough and the young maintain the new Ed line (“I was abroad at the time, I didn’t say anything, but I was agin it”). The Tories have reinvented their pre-invasion history to depict themselves as unfortunate dupes of the unscrupulous Blair. Nothing — and I mean nothing — could be farther from the truth. And then there are the vocal “anti-war” demonstrators who believe that Mr Blair is a war criminal who, despite the failures of successive inquiries to indict him, will one day be brought to justice. Maybe, just maybe, when Chilcot reports at the end of the year ...
It is exhausting to revisit some of these arguments. And, actually, redundant. What good can it do? The trouble is that owning the past allows you to own the future. So if the conventional historical view becomes that Iraq was a dreadful error for which nothing at all can be said, that leaches into present and future.
Much of that judgment should be made in Iraq itself. I went there in 2004 and found a country dazed and chaotic. “These years under Saddam have changed the characters and psychology of the people,” a student at Baghdad University told me. “You can’t change it back so quickly.”
In 2006-07 Iraq was almost, but not quite, in a civil war. Then the US “surge” happened, the Sunni minority turned on the jihadis, and life began to improve. In 2006 29,000 people died in Iraq as a result of violence. By last year it was 4,500. By comparison with most countries that’s bad. But in Venezuela, a country of comparable size and ironically much loved by some of those who so hate Mr Blair, there were nearly 22,000 murders in 2012.
In 2010 62 per cent of Iraqis voted in the general election. This falls short of the 100 per cent turnout for the unanimous re-election of Saddam in 2002, but beats two out of three of our most recent general elections. Iraq’s economy is growing at about 11 per cent a year. The last poll I have, taken in April last year, shows 55 per cent of Iraqis optimistic about the economy.
The greatest concerns were lack of jobs and the appalling state of some basic services, such as water and electricity. Worry about security showed high regional variation, being a top concern of nearly half in the western Sunni area, but less than a tenth in Kurdistan. There was an even split on the question “Iraq today is a real democracy”.
Those are the stats. But when historians judge the Iraq war they also have to deal with the counter-factual. What would have happened if the 2003 invasion had never taken place? Would that have been better or worse? And by how much?
That’s why I mentioned Halabja. Saddam was not a Robert Mugabe or a Korean Kim. He was far worse — a terrible blend of external aggression and internal repression. In 1980 he invaded Iran and 400,000 died. In the Eighties he killed between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds in a genocidal campaign. Both times he used chemical and biological weapons. In 1990 he invaded Kuwait. In 1991 he put down the Shia uprising with up to 50,000 deaths. His refusal to abide by UN resolutions in the next decade led to sanctions that had a terrible impact on Iraqis.
No invasion, and Saddam, or his murderous sons, Qusay and the psychopathic Uday, would still be there. Or not? “No!” object many anti-war people. “Saddam would have been toppled by the Arab Spring! Or there’d have been a coup!”
And I look at Syria — where Assad, the palest version of Saddam, has presided over a repression and a civil war that has killed 70,000 in two years in a country significantly smaller than Iraq. Right now, the unaided Syrian opposition is compromised by extreme jihadis filling the vacuum we have left.
If Saddam had been left unscathed, can one imagine what he might be doing now as Syria implodes? And if he’d been sprung by the Spring, surely Saddam’s civil war would have been Syria on steroids; the conflagration that could have absorbed the region.
We feel more strongly about Iraq, where we intervened and shared the trauma, than about Syria where we didn’t and haven’t. How we’ll judge our response ten years on from the first demonstration in Damascus I have no idea but a great foreboding.
